Mozilla is continuing its march toward an official launch of Firefox 3 with the release of Firefox 3 beta 2. This update features more infrastructure improvements than major new features, but it packs all the goodies of Firefox 3 beta 1 plus a few new items including:

• New location bar that shows history and bookmarks
  
• Improved security features including anti-virus integration in the download manager and stricter SSL error pages
• Better password management
• Easier add-on installation
• New download manager with resumable downloading
• Full page zoom
• One-click bookmarking
• New graphics and font rendering architecture
• Over 330 memory leak fixes

You can find a complete list of updates in the release notes. There are still some kinks to work out, but that's to be expected in any beta release (with the possible exception of a Google beta product). We're not quite ready to give up on Firefox 2 as our everyday browser, but Firefox 3 is tempting us a bit more with every beta release.

If you want to try out Firefox 3 beta 2 without installing it and risking data loss from your Firefox 2 profile, you might want to check out the portable version.